Office 2000 Premium or OpenOffice?

[eqmassa]

I've never used OpenOffice, but I lost my copy of MS Office 2003 so I'm exploring alternatives to installing my copy of Office 2000 Premium.  It seems that the interfaces are exactly the same, but while I'm at school, I can't afford to have others have trouble opening files I email them, etc...

I'll also be using MS OneNote at school and don't know if it'll conflict with OpenOffice... any opinions would be appreciated.

[llavoy]

My computer came with the crappy MS Works software, so I started using OpenOffice last semester. I think its great, and even has a couple small interface advantages over Word. It's just important that whenever you are saving a file that someone else might have to open, just choose to save it as a Word or WordPerfect or what-have you file; it'll do the conversion for you.

[john jacob]

openoffice should be fine. Only problem you might run into is if you accidentally save it in the openoffice format .odf, which is incompatable with WORD. it defaults to odf which actually can be a problem if you're not careful.

[Strong]

LOL @ buying MS Office. Learn how to use torrents, and find a copy of Office online. Problem solved.

17 USC § 501 Infringement of copyright

[eqmassa]

LOL @ buying MS Office. Learn how to use torrents, and find a copy of Office online. Problem solved.

17 USC § 501 Infringement of copyright

What a shocker.  You probably just singlehandedly brought down the entire online file-sharing racket.

[whitearbiter]

OpenOffice is incredible considering its cost ($0.00) but I actually prefer shelling out $80.00 for the subsidized university copy, because OpenOffice has some idiosyncratic placements of stuff that'll be annoying at first if you're a long term MS Office user like me. Also, OpenOffice is a HUGE memory hog, and for some reason, between OpenOffice and Firefox, there's a memory leak somewhere that gets me all riled up. OpenOffice is more memory-intensive because it's not as refined as MS Office and it has, at least for me, a noticeable difference in speed, at least for this 5-year old clunker of a desktop I built back in the day (1800+ Athlon, 1 gig RAM).

If you're strapped for cash or the local law school/university doesn't offer a bargain for Office, use OpenOffice. If I remember correctly though, MS Office 2k wasn't that bad either.

Have no experience with OneNote.

[taplinb]

I like OpenOffice, though higher-end features of Word and Excel might not work, e.g. macros. If you have a Mac, NeoOffice is a custom version of OpenOffice "aquified" to look and work like other Mac apps. Nice and fairly mature, though not as fast or featureful as Office 2004 for OS X. OpenOffice has all the basics, most of the fancy stuff.

As for outlines, maybe OneNote. Much as I dislike Microsoft, that's a cool application. My favorite non-Microsoft academic desktop tool may be WordPerfect, which is still surprisingly good, especially for outlining. It can output to PDF, read and write .doc files just like the latest OpenOffice (more or less), and seems stable and powerful.

However, I worry about my laptop being dropped or stolen, so I may use Google Docs for briefs. It is a far cry from a high-end word processor, but I won't have to worry about backups and can use any computer on the Internet.  Some may worry about privacy or the reliability of the Internet, but I have less faith in the survival of local drives, and I do not plan to blow much time running backups. Also, you can email a doc to a Google account and have it ready to edit later, a possible time saver. I have this briefing form which sends such an email when completed.

I'd like to try the beta of Thinkfree Premium, but they have been slow about responding to my request, and I think it's too new to be counted on. Google Docs is also young, but seems very stable and should serve my purposes.